Leslie Fiedler

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way, which would clear the way for something better to come along.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

The middlebrow, I hate.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.

It's funny to be a critic.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.